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100% most useful class in 10th grade. Manual. I took an early Selectric to college. Only one on the hall. Late 80s I paid my NYC bills working graveyard on Wall St as a temp in Goldman Sachs wordprocessing pool. I'm very grateful for QWERTY.

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I had a Smith-Corona word processor at first, with brand new Word-Eraser coming out some time after I started using those machines. It was sort of revolutionary to push a button and just watch the entire last word you typed get whited-over in real time. I was kind of awestruck every time I saw that.

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That Daniel guy sure sounds like an underappreciated genius to me. Much like the Dvorak keyboard.

Great post as always. It's nice to know the context for QWERTY that I didn't previously have.

And thanks for the shoutout!

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I didn't mention it in the piece, but "Dvorak" totally sounds like an alien race from Star Trek.

"If the Federation hadn't won the war of '35, we'd all be speaking Dvorak today!"

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Clearly a Vulcan name

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More efficient than QWERTY.

Rolls off the tongue easier than "Klingon."

Yet overshadowed by both.

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More powerful than the Klingon language. Able to leap tall metaphors in a single bound. All hail Dvorak, our supreme leader from another planet.

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That's "Ann dacn Ekrpatw rgp oglp.m. n.ae.p uprm abryd.p lnab.yv" in Dvorak, by the way. (True story: https://chaidarun.com/dvorak)

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Thanks. I hate it.

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Okay, I'm gonna be THAT GUY lol. The reason QWERTY won out is not only a massive head start, but also because when mechanical typewriters were a thing, they were the least susceptible to jamming up. And when Dvorak came around, no one was able to show that the more ergonomic design was actually any faster. #face

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Good summary!

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I type on a Dvorak keyboard and have on my own computers since I was in college 20 years ago. I can still type QWERTY if I need to, though I need a few moments to be entirely sure where my fingers should go (I learned to touch-type Qwerty in 7th grade, so the memory is there.) I don't know; Dvorak just feels better, like the words roll off the fingers, but I'm not unbiased either.

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That's really interesting, Katja! Would you have any interest in writing a little bit about your experiences with the Dvorak? It's all new to me, but I really enjoyed learning about the alternative to what I grew up with. It's such a hidden little history.

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The other bit of bad luck for Dvorak was that I think the first typewriters with the Dvorak keyboard hit the market in about 1930, and with the Great Depression just taking hold, the demand for new typewriters wasn't very high.

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If you'd be interested, sure, though I don't know how interesting it all is. I learned about Dvorak as a kid; back in the day Mavis-Beacon had the option of learning Dvorak as well as QWERTY, though I heard later that they were mostly the same lessons rather than Dvorak-specific exercises. Although I'm a little bit of a contrarian and always have been, the "prudent" thing then was to learn QWERTY, so I did, and I'm actually glad I did - there are so many situations where there is no option to go to Dvorak.

When I was in college, my roommate left her computer with me one summer since she didn't want to drag it all the way to Alaska and back, and she told me that I could use it while she was away. That summer, another friend got me a Dvortyboard, which was a keyboard that had a button to switch from Qwerty to Dvorak on the keyboard - no going into computer settings! Also, it had the Qwerty layout on the keys in black, I believe, and Dvorak in blue, so I could actually look down at my fingers if I was lost! :) (I find on-screen keyboards to be just about as helpful.)

Anyway, I got a laptop of my own a few years later, and went to Dvorak on that; when I was working in an office, I changed the setting of my computer to Dvorak; all my computers from that time on have had Dvorak as the default. My desktop computer even has a "Dvorak" keyboard, though in actuality, it's just a simple, flat keyboard where someone rearranged the keys. (Rearranging the keys doesn't work on most keyboards, as most are "tilted" for the sake of ergonomics.)

I enjoy Dvorak a lot, not just for the sake of being different, but because it's so easy to type. Dvorak put a lot of research into the layout, so not only are the most common letters in the home row, but there's generally an "out to in" motion and letters that generally go together are handled by different fingers to be as efficient as possible. I found it much, much easier to memorize where all the letters are because it's so logical - left hand, home row has the vowels, period. Right hand home row has incredibly high-frequency consonants, and the bottom row has all the least-used letters. Having the keyboard memorized is much more important that with Qwerty, because most of the time, in my experience, a person is not going to have the Dvorak letters on the keys.

It's got a lot easier to "do" Dvorak, especially with keyboard maps being part of operating systems now and everything. The annoying thing is, though, that there are interesting "blips" to this. With Windows back in the day, there was a keyboard shortcut to changing the keyboard, and I'd occasionally trip that until I read up how it was done so I could stop doing that. I have Dvorak on my laptop running Ubuntu now, and it seems if someone randomly hits the keyboard with their hand, the computer defaults back to Qwerty apparently because the only reason you'd be hitting the keyboard like that is because you were so frustrated with the "wrong" letters coming up. If the computer has been in Qwerty and I open a program before changing the keyboard, occasionally computers will register that as changing the layout for that program only (which, mind you, is not a bug; it can be quite useful, say, if your computer is set up in English but you need to write a document in Russian). It also helps keep my kids off my computers, because nobody wants to deal with my keyboards! *L*

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I love this history. Did you learn Dvorak from Mavis-Beacon yourself? If so, what year was that?

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I believe that at some point Mavis-Beacon dropped its Dvorak module, at least for a couple of editions.

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Very interesting stuff, Katja! I did "electronic keyboarding" some time during the late 80s, probably like 89 or maybe even 90 (sophomore year?). This was just before computers became widely available in homes, and well before the internet.

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No, I never used the Dvorak module of Mavis-Beacon. I learned to type QWERTY in 1991, when I was 12. My elementary school had had us occasionally use an ancient typing tutor, but it hadn't been enough to stick. We got a computer at home, and Mavis-Beacon was purchased because it was kind of decided that typing was a skill that we kids (and especially me, as the oldest) needed.

I had my summer of Dvorak back in 1999, which was the summer I turned 20. Basically, it was me and the Dvortyboard and lots of practice with my summer school classes and ICQ or whatever we were messaging with back in those days. *L*

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I read that first sentence in my typing teacher's voice. Who knew that would be one of the classes I'd get the most out of? Guess Ms. Singer got the last laugh.

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For high school, this was the ultimate "surprise class" in terms of how much I got out of it. Maybe it was home ec for middle school (grilled cheese sandwiches and check writing!), and in college, for me, it was HTML snuck inside an art class!

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I took a typing class in high school and I'm glad I did. A very useful skill nowadays...

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I had a typing class in elementary school/middle school. It was a big deal for the small rural town I was in. Every student had their own numbered chromebooks that they used for their interactive typing lesson. It honestly didn't really help me much. I think I was 15 or 16 before I stopped claiming paper and pen was the superior way to write things and finally stopped typing with a single finger at a time. I can't remember what exactly triggered the change nor can I remember when I became an actually good typist, but gosh those typing classes did not help me as much as they probably should've.

It's really interesting hearing discussions over comfort/tradition over efficiency though. I often wonder if these are the sorts of things that stop a lot of big advancements... though the question remains, is advancement necessary if the thing we're comfortable with is working just fine?

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This is a really interesting area of tension I'd love to see explored further. Are you maybe inspired to jot something down along those lines?

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Yeah that'd be a really interesting thread to follow a little further, I'd be happy to!

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Let me know if you run into any walls or want an additional bit of input. It might be a good collaboration, but I'm not sure.

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Fascinating post. My own poor typing is a real issue for me. I never had any classes. They weren't available at my school. Is it too late for me to learn, I wonder? Any tips?

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I don't think it's too late to learn, no! I would begin by learning the finger placement I mentioned, and work outwards from there. Each finger is supposed to correspond with its most efficient keys, so there's a little tweaking to be done, but as soon as you can type without looking at the keyboard, something magical happens between your brain and hands.

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>>but as soon as you can type without looking at the keyboard, something magical happens between your brain and hands.<<

Yes! The same thing happens with musical instruments where once you're comfortable enough with it; music just kind of happens. :)

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Or with your voice! I love that.

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Oct 28, 2023
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Same, Deborah! I'm on my laptop a lot for that reason.

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Oct 28, 2023
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It's sad, but I recognize that it's probably progress overall. The thing that I zero in on the most these days is that I seem to "think" with my hands, sort of allowing them to be a part of what my brain wants to say. Our understanding of how the mind works is still incomplete, but recent studies have suggested that our gut is sometimes just as important as our brain in the "thinking" process. I think about how important my hands are in my own thinking process, and wonder how that could be replaced.

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